Second Chance at the Belfast Guesthouse. Anne Doughty

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       Six

      Drumsollen House,

      24, June 1963

       My dear Robert,

       I have some wonderful news. We have done it. We have broken even. Just. Only just, but as our good friend Emile used to say, ‘That my friends is a great achievement. Without that first step nothing else can happen.’

       I still can hardly believe it! If you had seen me checking and rechecking the additions and not believing what they were saying you would have laughed. Had those been the figures presented by one of your clients I would have been satisfied right away.

      Clare paused, shook her fountain pen impatiently, then reached for the bottle of ink. Perhaps, if she wanted to write as fast as this, she should use the typewriter, but Robert always wrote to her by hand. She was sure he felt it was more personal. Besides, there was the question of punctuation. As she was unlikely to find a typewriter with a French keyboard in one of the second-hand shops in Belfast, she’d still have to add acute and grave accents afterwards.

      She wiped the excess ink from her nib with blotting paper. Immediately, she had a vivid image of the meticulous way Robert performed the same task, a small, robust figure hunched over his enormous desk, looking even smaller when set against its wide expanses of rosewood and polished leather and the tall windows overlooking the Place de l’Opéra reaching upwards behind him.

      Five years ago, she stood in front of his desk for the first time and five years ago, this very month, she had made the journey to Paris, lonely and dispirited after breaking off her engagement. She had no idea where she could find a job or somewhere to live. All she had was a single suitcase and the Paris address of Marie-Claude, whose children she had cared for at Deauville for three summers in her student years. Marie-Claude had comforted her, dressed her like a Frenchwoman, and Gerard, her financier husband, had found the job with Robert and encouraged her to apply for it.

      She put down her pen again and paused, overwhelmed by the memory of the vulnerable girl she had been, suddenly bereft of the love that had sustained her since the death of her grandfather. With no home to go back to in Ireland and no job awaiting her in France, she arrived in the lovely apartment in the Bois de Boulogne not knowing she was about to get a First, that Marie-Claude and Gerard would support and care for her and that Robert would take her on as his interpreter and personal assistant at a salary far in excess of anything she could ever have earned in Belfast.

      Travelling with him and translating what he had to say to the businessmen who came to him for loans taught her about banking, about money, about risk and the problems of running a business. Now it was these very skills she deployed day and daily to make Drumsollen a viable proposition, its hoped-for success the basis for all their future hopes and plans.

      Running a guest house in Ireland might seem far removed from the problems Charles Langley had faced importing fruit from France and Italy, even more so from those of the good-natured Texan entrepreneur who had decided to add some vineyards to his European investments, but she had grasped very quickly that business had its own logic, its own repeating patterns, and a whole set of variables to be considered and balanced against each other. Sometimes she thought the problems were like a difficult jigsaw. You searched for missing pieces and kept finding nothing would fit. At other times the difficulties she regularly translated for Robert’s benefit seemed to her more like a route march, a long, hard struggle over rough ground, littered with unforeseen obstacles to a distant goal which was just as likely to recede before you as be reached by your efforts.